Faculty & Staff

Faculty

Yuming He

Yuming He, Ph.D.

(On leave Winter 2005, Spring 2006)

Assistant Professor in Chinese Literature and Director of Undergraduate Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

hey@uchicago.edu

Teaching/Research Interests:

The literature and culture of late-imperial China (currently focusing on theater, performance, and music), the history of the book (focusing on woodblock prints, both texts and images), and Chinese intellectual history.
My current work focuses on the book market of late-Ming China, particularly newly popularized publication genres of that period (encyclopedias, literary miscellanies, collections of games, jokes, and other entertainment literature). Such publications also allow us to examine the relation between woodblock illustrations and their accompanying texts, shedding light on a historically unique set of attitudes about interpretation and the visual past shared by the original audiences of these publications. I am currently working on a book that attempts to situate these woodblock publications within their contexts of transmission and circulation in China—and even to East Asia and beyond—and to examine the rise of a new form of book literacy in conjunction with the new linguistic, visual, material properties of these woodblock books.

Other interests include spatial imagination and the production of geographical knowledge in late-imperial China, trans-regional culture, manuscript novels from the Qing, as well as occasional ventures into 20th-century intellectual history.

Selected Publications:

“Difficulties of Performance: The Musical Career of Xu Wei’s The Mad Drummer.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, December 2008

“Wang Guowei and the Beginnings of Modern Chinese Drama Studies.” Late Imperial China, December 2007

Courses